Topic: here's just how screwed ASIC buyers are - READ THIS if you have a preorder - page 8. (Read 23314 times)

Are you counting the ROI from when you start mining or when you sent your money?

The customer should never see the order# (or at least the row number in the database). They understood this even back before computers were in common use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem

In 6-12 months those ASIC devices will be replaced with better equipment.
During that time they will not lower their Price and here is why.

Reason 1. Have a product to offer that is better then your competitor makes you money.
Reason 2. During the time of development they will have to fund that research.
Reason 3. If you lower the price of the devices your existing customers bottom line will be effected.

Solution 1. Reveal a 2nd generation device before your competitor.
Solution 2. If it makes business sense offer full value trade-in on  first gen pre-order devices.
Solution 3. If you happen to lower your prices. Offer trade-in options will less credit towards 2nd generation pre-order devices.

IMHO To have a successful business and or project you should adopt a policy that will never burn your bridges with your customers.... Ever...

You contradict your own post where you say that people buying an SIC now will not make their money back...

So how does increasing the price afterwards make more people buy your product if they can't even make their money back on the earlier bought models....

Apart from Avalaon, bASIC and BFL there's also Tycho coming with an ASIC in Q1 2013 and ASICMINER will be heads on with BFL in rolling out the first ASICs albeit they will use the 1st 15TH wordt of chips to mine for their shareholders and then start selling them.

With an increasing network speed prices will have to come down or no-one will buy

totally agree that everyone needs to make up their own mind based on their own risk profile for an investment.  I've made my calculations (and just redid them!) based on the information I have, and view my investment in mining hardware as a high risk investment that I expect to pay off in 6-8 months, but if it doesn't (and takes a year?) then that's part and parcel of a high risk investment.

I advise anyone making investments in ASIC mining to do their own calculations and bear in mind exactly what Korbman/Desolator are saying in particular that things probably won't be the same in 12 months

Will

Everyone seems to be throwing that around but I don't see it happening.  The 3 manufacturers almost have a monopoly.  BFL will release first in all likelihood and they have a monopoly on "budget" hardware that's a bit slower but more affordable.  bASIC will have a monopoly on larger rigs that are actually built well.  All the pics I've seen suggest BFL uses REALLY sketchy parts like cheap fans and stuff.  And Avalon is releasing their products so unbelievably late, they're not even in the picture.

So that means they can all charge whatever they want.  Here's my theory.  Once a company has sold XX amount of mining hardware up front, jack up the price.  That's because for every ASIC miner you sell, you devalue your product.  The less people mining, the more you can charge because people's ROI calculations will result in a smaller time period.  Let's say it takes $50 to build a Jalapeno.  If the price is $300, less people will buy it but they'll be willing to pay more seeing as how less people are buying them.  Then it's just a cost of manufacturing thing.


You do know the more "faith" people have in bitcoins, the more ASICs will sell and the less money you'll make, right?   oh and since ASICs are basically the end of the technological ability of modern computers in relation to bitcoins since it's like a mini-computer designed to run mining calculations, it'd have to be quantum computers or something.  That or just faster ASICs with smaller nm transistors or whatever that can run at faster speeds but lower heat.

i don't consider an investment of 100-200 btc as high risk, come on guys!
high risk is if ASICs manufactures never deliver :p
 But since we have faith in BTC and  its value continue to rise then this investment will pay off even after 6-12 months.
I wonder though what device/technology will be more "profitable" than ASICs in the future!

The money vs performance ratio is better because their drivers suck and nobody would buy their products if they were even with Nvidia.  Did you ever notice if you install their driver on XP, it will load then reboot then tell you it relies on the .NET 2.0 framework and can't load anything in the driver's GUI without it?  Why would they write such big name software from such a wealthy company in freaking .NET?!  I'm a .NET programmer and I even think that was a stupid choice.

Then you've got crashes, crashes, and more crashes in any game that's been newly released followed by the game manufacturers advising you to turn off XXXX if you have an AMD card.  Nvidia doesn't seem to ever have that problem.  Then you've got shadows and lighting drawing incorrectly in 1 game and when they fix it, they break 5 other games.

I also couldn't possibly care any less about Linux support

And we all know that the cost of the ASIC devices will plummet as the marginal cost of producing the chips after the initial investment is close to zero (or very low)

Not going to happen.

There's one key aspect everyone misses when they predict their massive difficulty increases...and that's profitability. With a Jalapeno at 4.5GH/s, a 20x difficulty increase with NO increase in BTC/USD price would mean you're making 1.1 BTC per month. That's not even worth anyone's time for a $160 investment as it would take over 12 months to equal out (how you managed to calculate out 6 months I have no idea). And if you still think things will be the same in 12 months, chances are you're quite mistaken (look how far we've come as is...).

To compensate, either the value of BTC would need to drastically increase or the cost of ASIC devices would need to decrease.


EDIT: Missed this as I posted:

Much more likely. Inaba already noted well under 10x for BFL alone, so I can't imagine getting near 20x for quite some time even with all the other ASIC companies' preorders added in.

Lol, you must be joking.
Best performance per price, best linux support. It even works under Xen pci passtrught!

I hate to break it to you but that doesn't add up.  I myself am expecting a 16x difficulty rating but that was before I found out just how many BFL pre-orders were fake. I agree with a lack of increase in BTC/USD price and obviously the halving of the block reward but even my estimate puts the ROI at 9+ months, and that only adapted for 2x the original number of preorders in additional orders after they release the products.  a 20-30x difficult would mean closer to 1.5 year for a 100% ROI.

I'm expecting a 20-30x difficulty rating, no meaningful increase in BTC/USD price, a halving of the block reward, and a ROI of around 6-8 months... Agree that people expecting to get all their $$$ back in a week are crazy but over the long term the BFL power consumption means it will continue to be paying for itself well into 2013.

Will

Who would ever use an AMD card for gaming? lol.  The severe recurring driver problems that seem to only ever affect brand new games and complete crappiness of their driver design overall means I'm staying far, far away!  Nvidia is the only way to go for serious gaming.  Also a piece of crap GT440 with CUDA has been tested and proven to be 8x faster at rendering in Premiere than dual 10-core hyperthreaded Xeons on a server board.  Compared to an AMD card with OpenCL, it'd probably be faster to hit the render button, run to the store, buy a 440, install it, reload the entire project, and then hit go again.  The 440 would still finish first

Good to know, thanks.

Still a bit of a beast for the average user, but it holds at least >$100 value for now.

Actually the 5850 is still better than the 7770, or about comparable to any other low-to-mid range card.

I would think that the 5850 would not be a super desirable gaming card anymore, right? This means that instead of having a resale market based on BTC mining, it would have to compete with newer, cheaper, cooler cards in the gamer resale market.

I agree that the retail market is unlikely to really notice, unless you are a vendor focused on the BTC market. (although that ship sailed a while ago and I doubt that many think that GPU is going to have a revival or anything.)

I believe someone did the math a long time ago and determine bitcoin mining is still like 1% or less of AMD's GPU market so it might not drop as low as you think.

+1

There is this thing called a database that comes into play here. If you want to run a store you will have a database that keeps track of every customer, product, service, shipping rates, etc. Most importantly this database tracks ORDERS, and every order needs to be tracked. Some sites do this for every item added to a cart or (like BFL) every time someone hits "checkout" and starts the order payment and confirmation process.

The order number is actually tied to each attempted order so that if there is a problem, it can be traced back. If your CC fails to work, or your BTC took too long to transit, you as the customer are gong to want to be able to call/email them and complete the order once whatever is wrong is fixed. Some companies even will actively mine this information about discarded orders. To see this you can setup a business card order for 20,000 cards on a well known website and then cancel it to get a 60% off coupon in your email the next day.

In the case of BFL there have been confirmed cases where folks have abandoned carts, the real number of orders is at least 1/2 that, maybe as low as 1/5.